Health & well being benefits of internal & external Living Walls in the UK

The way that you decorate and set out our workplaces has a huge impact on both your employees and customers, and getting it right is highly important. Not only does your business space make a statement about your professionalism and your attitude towards caring for your staff. 

It was only a few of decades ago that we first started hearing about a phenomenon called sick building syndrome (SBS), otherwise know as Building Related Illness. With this, it has been quite well established that this was a very real condition that was associated with both poor physical environmental conditions and poor air quality at work. In come cases the actual physical shape and configuration of the building itself can have profound effects on the people within it. Physical parameters of a building are very difficult to change, so the only real alternative is to tinker with the internal and external workings, and that means what we put on our walls, and how we divide our workspaces.

Sick building syndrome has been one of the major driving forces behind the growth in living green walls and living green screens and living pictures. The notion of putting living plants as walls and screens in our workplaces has gathered momentum until there is an increasing number of companies seeking these out. Markedly different from having a collection of sprays of flowers of the occasional pot plant around the office, living walls and pictures bring the good effects of plant life into your office.

Studies have shown that SBS can be driven by a number of factors, including:

• Inadequate ventilation. This is often an air conditioning issue.

• Chemical toxins originating from indoors. Adhesives in furniture, and emissions from equipment such as photocopy machines can include dangerous toxins that enter the air.

• Chemical toxins from outside. Outdoor from automobile exhaust to plumbing vents can contribute to SBS. 

• Biological pollutants. Bacteria in collections of stagnant water in insulation and ducts can make workers feel unwell.

Living walls, Moss Walls, LiveDivider and LivePicture have been found to be effective at combating all of these sources of pollutant and can have an enormous positive effect on the quality of your office air, and therefore the health and wellbeing of your employees.

Living walls are shown to have a huge impact on the quality of air in enclosed areas like offices. Some studies have determined that a collection of living walls, moss walls and living pictures can remove as much as 87% of contained toxins in a 24-hour period. This means that you could see a massive reduction in office illness in a very short time.

These products are great at mopping up airborne toxic particulate because of their high surface area and the fact that air pollutants can become stuck on the surface and then converted into the plant’s biomass.

Living Walls, Moss Walls and Living Pictures are a great way to not only brighten up the office but to improve the air quality in them too. For those very good reasons, it makes sense to have living walls in your commercial environment.